Prodatron and Prevtenet are working on a virtual machine letting you running CP/M programs on SymbOS. First, screen drawing is faster because the emulation is using Z80 opcodes whereas CP/M is using 8080, and two you can of course have more than one CP/M VM due to SymbOS multitasking !

Yesterday there was a special Amstrad CPC show with the MO5 association MO5 on Twitch. You can see the replay on their Youtube channel. You will see Gunhed, Bruce and Maitre Joe GGP.

Ian Scott has released a new firmware v1.20 for his ISA card PicoGUS which supports the sound card Gravis Ultra Sound (and much more). This firmware replaces the Adlib mode with a SoundBlaster 2.0 mode where Adlib support is better, and also a fix for the MPU-401 emulation mode. The new firmware can be downloaded on Ian Scott's Github.

Retro Erick is presenting in video the PicoMEM ISA card made by FreddyV (FreddyV on Twitter).

This card is a must for all PC XT, even for 286, 386 and 486+, its features are (and more are on the way, see the github) :

• integrated BIOS
• less than 640 Kb ? You can fill up to 640 Kb (16 Kb granularity), it's possible to have up to 736 Kb of conventional memory
• EMS memory (2 Mb)
• up to 2 virtual disks drives and 4 virtual hard disks (up to 4 Gb). The images are on a SD card and can be created directly from the BIOS (recent feature)
• USB mouse but you must use a USB OTG hub with its own power !
• NE2000 network card support using wifi (it's better to be near your wifi router)
• POST code for PicoMEM cards rev 1.1 and 1.11 with this Sparkfun screen

Cwiiis has just released his arcade Amstrad GX4000 and CPC+ game : Oh Chute (web site to order a physical cartridge of the game).

You are Ron Danger, stunt person and extreme sports enthusiast. You just can’t get enough of sky-diving, but the local helicopter pilots have had it with your antics and are out to get you… It’s up to you to show them who’s boss!

Choose one of four different levels of varying difficulty and see how long you can survive. Sky-diving is hard enough alone, but those darned pilots aren’t going to make it any easier for you. Keep an eye on their movement and choose the right time to open your ‘chute and manoeuvre to one of the designated landing zones.

Cwiiis is the author of Maped, a python utility to edit Amstrad CPC(+) tilemaps (see on CPCWiki and Github).

On his Github you can find two other Amstrad CPC related utilities : dsk2dir (creation/extraction of .DSK) and cprtools (concatenate ROMs in one .CPR).

If you wish to learn Z80 assembler programmation especially for Amstrad CPC, then don't hesitate to go to Amstrad PUSH'n'POP, whom are now up to 50 articles on this subject.

Abalore in three words it's :

• the past in one word to start AbalaoreOS about which I didnt write in time (it started in February 2023). And yes, it's a WIP operating system for Amstrad. You can see video about it on CPCWiki and his Youtube channel.
• the present in two words first a wifi card which leads to its use Amsteam which is the streaming of Amstrad CPC games.

What will he bring us for the future ?

The Amstrad PCW emulator Joyce v2.5.2 by John Elliott already available for unix, windows and MacOS. It's a development version with Improved LocoLink emulation.

Los Elfos de Maroland is now also available in english. It's a graphic adventure game written by Dwalin for Amstrad CPC and PCW, msdos, C64, MSX1 and MSX2, Amiga and Atari ST. It's a conversion with DAAD of its game previously written with PAWS in 1993.